


between the dust and the debris

by Loz



Category: Life on Mars & Related Fandoms
Genre: Afterlife, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-13
Updated: 2012-10-13
Packaged: 2017-11-16 05:44:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/536132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Loz/pseuds/Loz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Monotony is a familiar friend, they get along together well. Monotony is routine by now. Though his routine’s shifted with the shift of people tramping through, day to day, the basics are the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	between the dust and the debris

**Author's Note:**

> Written for venturous1 in the Life on Mars Ficathon 2012, to the prompts: Sam/Gene, 20 years on (post A2A), reunited (could be virtual or actual). Title from the song ‘Last Day on Earth’ by Kate Miller-Heidke.

He tore up the last photos decades ago. Well, it felt like decades. Maybe it was more. Maybe it was less. He thinks he should’ve forgotten by now, he thinks he’s forgotten so much, but there, under his skin, he feels it. The emptiness. See, there’s your common or garden variety friendship, where you’re pleased as punch to get a pint, play at darts, rough-house and tease and maybe have a laugh every week or so. And then there’s whatever it was he had with Sam. The absence of it burns, hot like fire and brimstone and just as torturous. So it doesn’t matter how often he says to himself he should be over it, that life goes on. He knows it’s not true, deep down, and it’s never consolation. 

Monotony is a familiar friend, they get along together well. Monotony is routine by now. Though his routine’s shifted with the shift of people tramping through, day to day, the basics are the same. Wake up again from a dream that could’ve been real. Get ready for work. Work ‘til he’s bone weary. Cough an ungodly amount. Slip back to sleep. There’s some eating and smoking and drinking there, of course, though it’s in different quantities and enthusiasms any given hour, and he don’t know why he bothers. Doesn’t really understand why he bothers with any of it, to be honest, except that someone has to. 

He chose to be someone. Sometimes --- no --- let him continue to be honest here in his dying days --- often --- he wishes he’d chosen Sam instead. 

Gene doesn’t know if he has to pass through the door, whether he’ll even be allowed any more. He’s a horrible feeling he’ll be refused on the grounds of some time between his first stitch up and his last. Doesn’t know if it counts if it wasn’t real, but Sam used to say reality’s in the eye of the beholder. He wonders what’ll happen if he coughs his last, surrounded by piles of paperwork. Will he simply cease to exist, or will his soul be ferried somewhere safe and sound or dark and dangerous. 

At night, Sam tells him the Arms will appear any day, now. 

Gene doesn’t tell him he sees Keats on his periphery. 

*

“Aren’t you bored?” he asks. It must be the nineteenth time, wedged in between all the things he still can’t say. 

Sam shrugs, tilts his head to the side, considering. His eyes look golden in the bright white that surrounds them. It’s a good look on him. Sam died young and he’ll always seem that to Gene. He hasn’t aged, transformed appearance like Gene has. He asked him about it once and Sam said he didn’t know he could, but that he’s happy in this skin. It’s nice skin, Gene thinks absently, if he had that he wouldn’t want to change either. It isn’t as pocked with scars as his. Isn’t tainted by years of excess. 

“I thought I would be, but you know, I’m not. I fought for so long, Gene, don’t you think I’m due some rest?”

 _No rest for the wicked_ , Gene thinks, but he nods instead, automatically. 

Sam edges closer, leans into his space the way he used to late nights in the fictitious 70s etched from Sam’s memories. 

“I remember when you’d kick your legs up on the table and spend four hours reading the newspaper,” he says, “last I knew, you weren’t one to have difficulty finding something to occupy yourself with.”

“A lot can change, Sammy-boy.”

“Don’t you ---” Sam starts, mock-seductive expression faltering. 

_Miss me?_ Gene hears, loud as if it had been sung. And yes, he does, more than anything, but since he’s fairly sure he’s talking to a figment of his own imagination, he doesn’t respond to the unspoken question. The figment knows, just by dint of being there. The figment is his innermost thoughts. 

“ _Are_ there newspapers?” Gene asks, genuinely curious as well as deflecting.

“I’m not allowed to say,” Sam replies. 

He says this frequently. Gene doesn’t know whether to be ashamed his imagination’s so pathetic, or amused. He cuffs the hair at the back of Sam’s head and Sam chuffs out a laugh. 

*

He’d burned the jacket because he’d thought it would help burn away the last remnants of his memories. Fat lot of good that did. He has the memory of Sam’s scent being smothered by soot and ash, something sweet and --- well, he’ll say to himself if no one else --- _cherished_ becoming an acrid sting at the back of his throat. Anything happy he had left is now corrupted by bitterness. 

He flushes his tissues down the loo, washes his last remaining handkerchief a dozen times. Nothing gets rid of the blood. His colleagues don’t notice anything wrong. He became the lion with a wounded paw as soon as he landed in this Godforsaken place, only this time there’s no mouse brave enough to give him some reprieve. Just as well, he’d sooner squash them flat than go through the pain of making a friend to lose them again. He wonders if that’s obvious in the line between his eyes, his gait as he walks, just as he wonders how an immortal body can decay. 

He’s spent the past whenever wondering more about the criminals of this place --- about whether they’re actual souls, were once upon a time people with real lives --- or whether they’re ‘constructions’. He went down to the cells, once, quizzed a man for hours on end about anything other than his crime. The bloke was reticent at first, but opened up when Gene shared his fags and booze. He’d _seemed_ real enough. He’d a whole family with sibling rivalries and a pet when he was ten. He’d endless shitty jobs and eventual unemployment. He’d a broken leg when he was in his twenties and hadn’t that half hurt. Tonnes of detail, for something make-believe, but Gene has read a Western or twelve in his time. Perhaps him upstairs is simply a bored writer.

A sadistic bastard of a bored writer who likes to set fire to his creations.

*

Sam licks into his mouth like he used to when he was half-cut, hands framing his jaw and nose fitting perfectly against Gene’s. When he pulls away, his eyelashes are dark smudges against his cheeks, his lips are red and parted. 

“Sorry,” he says. “Just really needed to do that.”

There’s shame written across his cheekbones in a stain of pink. He stutters backwards like he’s worried Gene will hit him. 

He did, before, when the fear swallowed and choked him, when he couldn’t find the words to say he wanted but couldn’t have this. But surely now he knows that Gene will surrender? It’s his fantasy, of course he’s going to moan Sam’s name and pull him closer. How could he do anything but stroke his hand into hair that’ll be perpetually too short, tilt Sam’s head and nudge at his lips again? 

“When you come to the Arms, will you let me kiss you like this?” Sam asks, voice rasped and pupils limned sherry-brown. 

“When I come to the Arms, I’ll kiss you,” Gene replies. 

It isn’t a lie. He knows it’ll never happen. 

*

One morning he struggles to get out of bed. As soon as he manages, he feels like his chest has burst, loosing all his anger and fury into the world. Just another Tuesday, then. 

Except it isn’t, of course. He can feel it, deep inside, the emptiness clawing to escape. He looks out the corner of his eyes as he drives to the station, but all he sees is a blur. Luckily, there isn’t much black mixed in. He doesn’t see a familiar face leering at him. He thinks he may have made it home free. 

Keats is sitting in his chair. 

“We meet again,” he says with a mocking smile and Gene is tempted to punch the smugness right off his face, but doesn’t think he has the strength to punch for the required amount of time. “Are you ready to meet your maker?”

“I’m not his,” Gene says dismissively, even though he isn’t entirely sure that’s true. 

Keats lines the pens up on his desk until they form an orderly line. Gene notes that and purses his lips. He half-expects Keats to wear a different face when he turns away. “Maybe not, but you’ve done enough in service of him that you might as well be. Every man you fit up, every woman you spat on brought you a little closer to him. Doesn’t it just warm your heart?”

“And what did you do, Jimbo? To be his right-hand man?”

Keats eyes flicker, more reptile than human, and he pushes his glasses further up his nose. “You don’t seriously think my crimes could ever rival yours?”

“No, clearly I think they’re worse, you tarted up ponce. You think I’m frightened of the likes of you? You’re nothing but a snivelling little worm. I could crush you within an inch of your life.”

“You really couldn’t. Come, Hunt. Don’t make this any harder on yourself. I’d rather not scuff my shoes hauling you into the lift.”

Gene uses what strength he has left in his arms to tip the desk over. He marches out of the office, takes the stairs three at a time, crashing out into the grey London air. It makes his chest constrict, his lungs burn. He thunders down the road, not looking behind to see if Keats is following. It doesn’t matter, it isn’t surprising, and if he’s to be tugged down to hell, he’s damned well going to be _dragged_. 

The road changes. It might be a trick of the light, a hoax in his mind, his last gasps of imaginary oxygen conspiring to swindle him, but he swears he sees a darkened Manchester alleyway instead of the cold, clinical street he expects. 

And there, the Railway Arms, as it always used to look; warm, inviting, light spilling through the windows. ‘Welcome’ it says above the archway, and Gene hopes that holds true. Gene remembers the countless late nights propping up the bar, sitting in a dank corner, laughing at stupid fucking puns and victories hard-earned. 

There’s no shadow at the door this time, it doesn’t swing open to reveal Nelson. Gene walks forward as tentative as he has ever been, legs fairly trembling with the exertion. It certainly isn’t fear. Or confusion. Or hope and anticipation. It isn’t because he doesn’t think he deserves this, at the end of everything.

The Sam in his mind crows that he told him this day would come, that he can’t wait for them to be together once more. The Sam in his mind is waiting for him, for his lips and his promises and his desperation to make up for his regrets. So many regrets, tumbling together like weeds. There aren’t enough words in his vocabulary to make amends, but maybe there are actions.

Gene grasps hold of the brass door handle and it’s warm to the touch. Not heated like hellfire, but more like a whisky chaser on a cold day. Up close there’s faint noise and he knows if he opened the door a crack he’d hear voices, a jukebox, chairs scraping and glasses hitting tabletops. His heart hitches in his chest just thinking about it, about the people those voices might belong to, about reacquaintances too long forestalled.

Gene pulls open the door, closes his eyes and steps through.


End file.
